Boozy Book Club: The Cipher

Welcome to our first installment of Boozy Book Club! The goal is to read a book every month and then talk about it while drinking. Ideally, you will be drinking while reading this article and listening to our conversation so the alcohol loosens you up enough to leave a comment below!

The WTF-ery of the cover is a nice summary of the book

This month we chose The Cipher by Kathe Koja. In honor of Halloween, we wanted to choose a horror novel, and because this is Minerva, we wanted to choose a horror novel written by a woman. My first thought was to nominate Joe Hill because I read Heart-Shaped Box last year and found it pretty disturbing. Then I thought, how about Shirley Jackson? Her book TheHaunting of Hill House is a classic of the genre (and also inspired the pretty terrible The Haunting).

But we decided to poke around on the Internet first. Turns out, it took quite a bit of poking. Take this list of the 100 scariest horror novels of all time—it features fewer than 10 books written by women. One book that showed up on multiple lists was The Cipher. Not knowing anything else about it other than that, we decided to give it a shot.

Now you can listen to our drunken, somewhat on-topic discussion about it. We cover how much we felt about the main female character Nakota, whether the book should have been shorter, how we might view it differently than people in 1991 (the year it was written), and other tangents. In the future, we’d love to have comments and questions from listeners before we discuss to make it more interactive. And even further on, maybe a live stream.

It should be mentioned we’re open recommendations for future gatherings and to include you in the conversation if you’d like to Skype in! Listen below and then let us know how right you think our opinions are.